California Investigates Abuses at Cemeteries

By SETH MYDANS

Published: October 10, 1995

CARSON, Calif., Oct. 7—
The first discovery came in August at Paradise Memorial Park, a cemetery in the working-class Los Angeles suburb of Santa Fe Springs, where visitors came upon a 10-foot-high mound of bones and splintered coffins.

Then, at Lincoln Memorial Park, a rundown cemetery here in another suburb of Los Angeles, scores of discarded headstones were found in metal Dumpsters and in jumbled piles near a toolshed. In one instance, a tombstone was being used as a paperweight on a stack of telephone books in the cemetery office.

Now, investigators say they fear a pattern of abuses among California's 200 cemeteries and 150 crematories, where financial and procedural misdeeds have apparently proliferated in the absence of close monitoring by the state.

Raymond Giunta, the newly appointed executive director of the State Cemetery Board, said the owners of cemeteries and crematories appeared to have been plundering the $400 million in trust funds they were required to maintain for the long-term upkeep of cemeteries.

As plots have been used up, Mr. Giunta said, some owners have taken to digging up and reusing graves without permission, and to using single graves for multiple burials. At several sites, he said, he is investigating reports of mismarked or missing graves, the resale of used coffins and the summary cremation of bodies after burial services.

"The more we look, the more we find," Mr. Giunta said. "There basically has been no enforcement over the past 20 years, and now we're having to address the problem."

"These are atrocities against mankind," he added. "That you dig up someone's body just for a dollar, it's the epitome of greed."

And the problem may range well beyond California, say members of professional associations and consumer groups.

"It's pretty widespread," said Karen Leonard, who represents several consumer organizations and who was a research assistant for Jessica Mitford in the preparation of a new edition of Miss Mitford's 1963 book, "The American Way of Death," which exposed abuses in the funeral business and led to Federal action against price fixing by funeral directors.

"I've got files on it in Vermont and Maryland, I've got cases in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and it was almost accidental, their discovering these things," Ms. Leonard said. "It is probably, unfortunately, more prevalent than people realize. It's not that California has a greater amount of crooks or laxer laws."

John L. Blake, executive director of the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, which is based in Egg Harbor, Wis., said: "I think these things have been going on for years, though not with the degree that has been demonstrated in California, and quite possibly without having been noticed. I think it's just aberrations of the human spirit that people get greedy and forget their professionalism."

Ms. Leonard and others said the problems in California had remained hidden because the State Cemetery Board had for years been under the control of members of the cemetery industry and because little attention had been paid to investigations or the enforcement of regulations.

The two cemeteries here and in Santa Fe Springs have been taken over by the state, and their owners have not responded to repeated telephone calls for comment.

Bill Vlcek, a spokesman for the California Funeral Directors Association, an industry group, said: "It's discouraging that this is happening. The monitoring of the regulations, if you will, has been lax. I think it's a system situation. We are making some progress."

Because his staff is small, Mr. Giunta said, he has asked the state to name a task force to determine the scope of the problem in California. But a citizens' investigation of sorts has already begun.

Since the problems came to light two months ago, Mr. Giunta said, 45,000 people have milled around the headstones at the two cemeteries, seeking to verify the grave sites of their relatives. And as the news has spread, weekends have seen a heavy traffic of family members at other cemeteries, too.

The outpouring is unusual, Ms. Leonard said. Studies have shown that on the average, a family member visits a grave site no more than twice after a funeral.

Jeffrey Steinberger, a Beverly Hills lawyer who represents a growing number of family members in lawsuits against the two cemeteries, noted that both of them serve poor and minority families who might have been considered less likely to know their rights or to complain.

Mr. Steinberger maintains that Paradise Memorial Park engaged in trickery that began when a family would be ushered away from a burial service before the coffin was lowered into the ground.

"Then they would pull back the casket, throw the body into the grave, put a little dirt on it and bring in the next family," Mr. Steinberger said. "They would bury two people the same day, and two days later a third person, and a week later a fourth and another week later a fifth. They would do a nine-burial grave."

To make even more room, he said, the older graves were dug up and their contents discarded.

"They were taking the bodies out of the graves and putting them in a pile about 20 feet wide by about 40 feet long and about 10 feet high," Mr. Steinberger said. "It was just a pile of bones and decomposed body parts."

With the cemetery owners now nowhere to be found, family members have banded together in a "victims group" that helps visitors search for graves. At Lincoln Memorial Park here, volunteers sit under an awning with long, handwritten lists that try to map the 20-acre cemetery.

Sheltering from the hot sun, the group's founder, Audrey Hughley, said she had been lobbying for an investigation for more than a year, since the day her family could not find the grave of a relative.

Photo: At Lincoln Memorial Park, a cemetery in the suburb of Carson,Calif., where scores of discarded tombstones were found in Dumpsters and in jumbled piles, visitors last month searched for the graves of family members. (Scott Robinson for The New York Times)